Dyson is to launch a battery electric vehicle by 2020, taking the brand well beyond the fans, vacuum cleaners and hand dryers it’s known for today.

At present the company has 400 staff working on the project, and has committed 2.0 billion pounds ($3.4 billion) in funds to bring the vehicle to reality.

A production facility has yet be named, and the company has yet to provide any specifics about the vehicle’s range, power, performance numbers and body style.

We also don’t know whether the vehicle will be a mass market competitor for the Nissan Leaf or something aimed further upmarket, like the Tesla Model S. Given the premium positioning of Dyson’s home appliances, a luxury positioning seems likely.

I wouldn't count out Dyson. While staying mostly quiet about it, they are positioned pretty well with EV related tech, and I see it being more likely they deliver something amazing and game changing than the majority of today's clueless and scared ICE automotive OEMs.

Each carcinogen vapor exposure includes a dice roll for cancer.

Each mutagen vapor exposure includes a dice roll for reproductive genetic defects in your children.

Each engine start sprays them into a shared atmosphere which includes beings not offered an opportunity to consent accepting these cancer experiences and defective genetics life experiences.

Every post is a free gift to the collective of minds composing the living bleeding edge of LEV development on our spaceship.

Yup. Everything available is totally conventional cars, with electric drivetrains. Cool cars, for car people. The car needs to shrink until it is small enough to drown in a bathtub, for it make any difference. Something between a velomobile, and this.

On a very tangential note, I'm reminded of a time when a buddy of mine became fascinated by the fact that you don't have to register a street sweeping vehicle here. He was sorely tempted to buy a sweeper truck just for that reason.

Well, I think it would be a swell idea to allow unregistered street sweeping NEVs to be operated by unlicensed drivers, on the condition that they sweep the bike lane when one is present. Put those rotten drunks to work, right?

Now there's a market for Dyson to break into.

This is to express my gratitude to Justin of Grin Technologies for his extraordinary measures to save this forum for the benefit of all.

We recently bought Dyson cordless vacuum - wife and I very impressed and totally satisfied. If they ever do EV's we'll take a serious look.

Is there Dyson "hype"? Of course, but the product we bought is actually pretty well thought out and a much better cordless vacuum than the Bissell cordless Swivel we bought last year. Bissell battery system was one of the best at the time and it has been a great battery pack/charger. Trouble is, the vacuum itself is a horror show to use. So many areas poorly designed and implemented with severely lacking ergonomics.

It's as if Bissell hired someone like Luke to handle the battery system but left everything else to so-called engineers who have no business designing a stick of firewood, let alone a cordless vacuum cleaner...

If it weighs under 2,500 lbs, has a CdA of under .4 m^2, and has at least 200 horsepower, I'd be interested. Were it mid-pack placement with vector-controlled all-wheel drive, I'd be very interested. Make that 1,000 horsepower or something close to it, I become extremely interested. Today's auto industry is so inefficient and dominated by the concept of planned-obsolescence that such a thing would be a game-changer on a lot of measures, even though it wouldn't take a whole lot of exotic materials or unknown concepts nor exceptional creativity to make it work, just a lot of time and resources which the major automakers have in abundance.

The lower the weight and CdA, the better, although I doubt the Dyson will approach anything close to a velomobile in terms of weight/drag which would be the ideal for a maneuverable urban hoonabout jackassmobile AS WELL AS something designed for as low energy consumption as possible during mundane A to B travel. Performance and efficiency better work in tandem with each other, than against each other. The current way cars are built is totally backwards. A vehicle with a CdA under 0.2 m^2 and a weight of under 500 lbs would be even better!

It gets him from point A to point B, he's put over 60,000 miles on it as of that video, it cruises at 60 mph on only 1.2 kW, and he can go 100 miles for a few pence of electricity.

The only thing he's missing is "Practical" and "Fast", both easily doable without compromising any of the aforementioned desired traits possessed by this extraordinary vehicle. The vehicle is plenty practical for the one person who designed it and can safely operate his own machine, but I meant "Practical" in the sense of being able to pass inspection in most U.S. states, carry more than 1 person, possess rudimentary climate control and radio, possess workable windows(simple mechanical crank windows are ideal), not have to balance it on your feet when stopped, protect the rider and passengers in a high speed crash(roll cage, safety harness, and no airbags would be the beginning of the ideal, screw regulations), AND where any dumbass Boobus Americanus that can be given a license so that they can carelessly drive their clunker 5,000 lb SUV while drunk and hopped up on prescription meds with a lead foot in the bike lane while texting on their cell phone in one hand munching down a fast food concoction with the other while fixing their hair in the rearview mirror would still be able to "safely" operate this vehicle if desired, were they uninitiated to the vehicle without having to read the owners manual(which you know they won't).

"Fast" isn't that hard to do in comparison, given that the average new car does 0-60 mph in around 7 seconds.

But all of these tasks in the same car should be very simple for the multi-billion dollar automobile industry to accomplish in an affordable entry level vehicle, but they don't ever sell such a vehicle nor anything even a quarter of the way to it from where the industry currently stands. They'll make 60-100 mpg concepts using conventional materials demonstrating their capabilities and stir up interest and purchase offers, only for the consumer-desired products to never see the market. They'd rather sell you incrementally more efficient products in the meantime, rationing out each new advancement as slowly as required to maximize margins on the R&D expenditure, while commonly only pressed into action when the burdensome government regulations that these companies wrote to kill independent competition, demands it,

When you give the Lynchmobile 4 wheels, it would start to resemble an Edison VLC2. It wouldn't need much power to out-perform the average new car either, maybe 40-50 horsepower to go "fast"(0-60 in under 7 seconds), with potential to give the car hundreds and hundreds of delicious horsepower if desired for racing about, without vehicle efficiency during normal driving conditions being compromised much. As it is, Cedric's machine isn't all that slow anyhow, as it will more than adequately keep up with traffic with its 20 horsepower and still wouldn't be the slowest-accelerating motor vehicle on the roads.

Another interesting vehicle is the VeloTilt, needing 750W to do 60 mph:

Efficiencies on the order of 20-30 Wh/mile in urbans areas are totally doable for a highway-capable and "practical" vehicle, and anything capable of seating 4 passengers or less that needs more than 150 Wh/mile to fly down the highway at 75 mph is IMO extremely wasteful when compared with what is possible. This means virtually all of the cars on the road are energy hogs, needlessly wasting non-renewable resources and destroying the biosphere.

If Dyson came up with an all-wheel-drive 4-wheeled tandem two-seater that could get similar efficiency to the Lynchmobile, I'd be on it like flies on dung regardless of its performance, and I'm probably not the only one. Of course, getting something as light as that to perform well isn't delving into the unknown either, and if it could blow the doors off of a new car and was an "entry level" vehicle with a low cost compared to the average new car, I bet it would sell quite strongly.

The motivation for the current state of affairs in the industry is to bilk the "consumer" class serfs of their money instead, without concern for what the impact will be on the planet and the long-term viability of the human race that relies on it for sustenance. This model of planned obsolescence needs to die.

Dyson isn't a car company yet. That yields some hope that we will get something more along the lines of what Cedric Lynch has built, than what the auto monopolies are currently churning out. But I'm not expecting that unlikely scenario to be the one that materializes, either.

I love Cedric, and his vehicles and brilliant EMI and motor skills, but I I would personally prefer more than 60mph and autonomous driving and the ability to take my wife and ideally lane split and remain dry if it's going to be enclosed. I have a feeling the Dyson will be half sized model 3 level range and performance with autonomy and perhaps its own ride sharing network program, but those are just my wild guesses. Maybe scaled up RC car you ride on, which might actually be amazing on and off road with individual wheel torque control and lots of torque on long travel A-arms.

Each carcinogen vapor exposure includes a dice roll for cancer.

Each mutagen vapor exposure includes a dice roll for reproductive genetic defects in your children.

Each engine start sprays them into a shared atmosphere which includes beings not offered an opportunity to consent accepting these cancer experiences and defective genetics life experiences.

Every post is a free gift to the collective of minds composing the living bleeding edge of LEV development on our spaceship.

I've had a couple Dyson products. they have been good. I'm more impressed by how Dyson attacks a problem sideways.

Back in the early 1990s Dyson had built a cyclonic diesel exhaust filter. Worked great, but never caught on.
Dyson used that tech to improve vacuum cleaners and built an empire. Now Dyson has a battery company that is building 400w/kg cells with no electrolyte, and has released an internal memo where he expresses bewilderment at the term "Clean Diesel"

If I had to guess, I'd bet Dyson was going to take aim at the diesel market again. But for passenger cars? That's a highly competitive market saturated with some very innovative choices right now.
There is another market that makes sense, though, and would be good gateway to grow into the automotive market.

Delivery trucks.

Given Dyson's desire to clean out diesel, and since many delivery fleet vehicles are diesel, especially in Europe where Dyson is located, I bet the Dyson electric vehicle gets aimed right at the small truck/light van market. An obvious market would be for companies like Amazon, who have shown interest in their own delivery fleet. So I'll be watching for any news of Dyson in talks with Amazon.

So this mornings' 'Frosty Heidi and Frank' radio show included their game "Get the FAKE Out" where there's only one fake news story, though the others sound untrue. Such as a big deal being made about finding Paul Revere's OUTHOUSE! One of the stories was about the Dyson electric car. They made all the vacuum car jokes, I suppose they were reading the board here. But they didn't call it fake, though a caller did. The fake was a sexually graphic representation that I won't repeat. No surprise from that group, a caller complained that Frosty was too MORAL!

To me it makes sense, Dyson has a lot of engineering experience with electric motors in expensive objects people like to buy, who knows maybe its part of a plan to take its business public and list on the stock exchange etc as people seem to really eat this stuff up.
I don't really see Elon Musk a great deal smarter than Richard Branson with his Virgin Galactic business etc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Galactic
The only real difference is that Elon was smart enough to list his tech companies on the public stock market so that folks can take part and trigger the deep tribalistic protectionism of peoples brains that goes into overdrive for biased support for him etc (oh and he's fighting against CO2).

The Toecutter wrote:If it weighs under 2,500 lbs, has a CdA of under .4 m^2, and has at least 200 horsepower, I'd be interested.
..
The lower the weight and CdA, the better, although I doubt the Dyson will approach anything close to a velomobile in terms of weight/drag which would be the ideal for a maneuverable urban hoonabout jackassmobile AS WELL AS something designed for as low energy consumption as possible during mundane A to B travel. Performance and efficiency better work in tandem with each other, than against each other. The current way cars are built is totally backwards. A vehicle with a CdA under 0.2 m^2 and a weight of under 500 lbs would be even better!

One thing I think is that existing all major car companies don't want is vehicles like this because its difficult to ask a lot of money for them, Elon Musk very much included, they all secretly hate it because they are all about the making maximizing their stock prices, pure and simple. They have people running around scared shtless of the odourless invisible CO2, the gas they create every single time they take a breath ( https://youtu.be/k6-Sk0FEGGQ?t=7m36s ) so its not surprising why they can't figure out why these types of vehicles haven't hit the market, not enough money -> https://youtu.be/OwqIy8Ikv-c?t=3m21s
This is why EVs like the Lit C1 etc have been sitting around since forever not moving forward or taken up by larger companies.

Your vehicle looks a lot like the Lit Motors all-electric C1 EV. The Founder/CEO of the company had a really nasty regular motorbike accident that put him out of action for a few years but I think its kind of back now but there hasn't been any progress on his vision since his accident as far as I know which is a real shame.

Drunkskunk wrote:I've had a couple Dyson products. they have been good. I'm more impressed by how Dyson attacks a problem sideways.

one giant roller ball

Kick down the barricades Listen what the kids say.
From time to time people change their minds But the Frock is here to stay.
I've seen it all from the bottom to the top Everywhere I go the kids wanna Frock.
Around the world or around the block Everywhere I go the kids wanna Frock.

I'm more interested in their solid state battery tech. If they get that sorted out even if they can't accomplish an entire car the could still revolutionize ev's and sell drivetrain components to oems.